Day to Night Conversion | Nuke Tutorial

in this video I'm going to show you how I converted this daytime scene into nighttime in Nuke I'm the NASA with action VFX and I will be your instructor for today so let's get started so this is a very simple process first of course you're going to need your background plate of the footage that you shot during the day now creating day to night most of the time is just going to be very stylized because your initial plate will be bright because there's a lot of ambient and bounce like from the Sun that is just not present on an actual night shoot but in general you want to avoid having a direct sunlight that casts hard Shadow on your footage and you won't avoid having a bright specular highlight that is produced from the sunlight this shot here is great it's overcast there is no harsh Shadow there is no blood specularity so we can easily convert this into a nighttime using some color correction so first thing first usually during the night there won't be a lot of color so we want to get saturation and desaturate the plates and then I want to darken this so let's get color correct node and I want to reduce the game and we want to tint the color to be a little bit more blue usually when we want to play with the color Hues of the knobs you want to click on this four input or the color wheel but there's actually a third way to play around with the color a little bit better you can hold shift and click on the color wheel and you will have this window that shows a more robust settings of your color so from here I want to darken our game intensity and let's tint towards the blue Just a Touch and then let's darken the gamma as well and tint it a little bit towards the blue and then maybe reduce the saturation again here by the way we have a lot of other content on our Channel like VFX breakdowns stock footage announcements and other tutorials that we release weekly so make sure to hit like And subscribe so you don't miss out and help us reach 100 000 subscribers and now let's go back to the video so next I want to separate the actor from the background a little bit but I don't want to make it too obvious so what I will do is to create a bit of contrast by pulling out the highlights of the scene so let's Branch our plate and create a Luma key and let's go to the alpha Channel and we want to isolate just the bright aliens and then let's add grid to our composition pump up the gain really high and then let's mask this grid based on the Luma key now of course we are brighten up the highlights of the entire plate whereas we just want to brighten up our actor so to do that we're going to need to isolate our guy here by rotoscoping him now I'm going to skip the entire rotoscoping process because it's a lot but basically here I have rented out the result of my rotoscoping which is just a combination of some King and some help from AI Roto and some manual rotoscoping this is a very very rough riddle but for what we are about to do it's good enough for the job so I'm going to turn this into an alpha Channel by using Shuffle and then let's erode The Edge just a little bit and add some blur and now it's ready to use so I will use this Roto to mask our Luma key so get merge and merge our Luma key with the mat and then I'm going to turn the merge into either mask or in so that way we are masking the Luma key based on our actor map so now we can see our bright highlights is only affecting our actor next we can see that we have some bright sky on our background which is problematic there are two ways to deal with that first we can try to get rid of that black spot which would be very challenging or we can work around it by diffusing that black spot into an atmosphere basically creating this stylized Moonlight look so to do that I'm going to use this Haze and fog asset which you can get on our website especially now during our VFX Mass sale where everything is 40 off so next I also created this noise pattern that then I can use to mask our fog so that way the fog has a little bit more broken up texture on it now to merge this fog into the plate we're going to have to 3D track it so it doesn't just float on the shot I'm not going to go through the tracking process but long story short I did a manual track where I essentially just tracked some individual points of the scene and transfer those manual track into the camera tracker node and then I track the scene solve it and generate a camera you can check out the full tutorial on this very topic on my other video link in the description below so once we have the camera tracker let's composite our fog in 3D space and to do that I'm going to use part 3D so part 3D is essentially a node that allows you to compose the elements in 3D space without the need to create the whole 3D scene with the scanline render and whatnot all you need to do is plug the elements to the card and if you have a camera set the camera as well and here on our 3D view we can position our fog based on the camera of the scene okay so now let's add grid to tint our fog to be a bit more blue so our fog here is tracked into the scene but still looks like a car I want to make it a bit more volumetric and to do that we're going to simulate a fake death and to create the fake death we're going to create a fake death map by just using rotor shapes so here is a fake death map that I created using just a bunch of photo and if you look at the alpha Channel I basically created this thick background layer and then we have some three rotos that is occluding the white background with each of these trees have varying opacity to simulate the depth and of course all these three is based on the real tree that is on the plate so now we have this fake death map I can use this to mask our fog to simulate that volumetric death ring now of course we want this rock to be behind our actor so let's copy our math of the actor from earlier and merge it into our background Roto and then we want to use our actor as a stencil and this is what we have another element that I added into the background is this particle which I set up on multiple 3D cards the same way as before and then I tinted blue added some blur and changed the opacity and then merge it on top of the smoke just before the mask okay so now we have our actor being a bit too dark especially around the face so let's fix that because we want to be able to see the person that is on this shot so what I will do is to add some light blue that is casting around the eyes from the goggles and to do that is very simple I'm just going to use great and make our composition very bright green and then I created this Roto mask that follows around the shape of the eye and use that to mask the grid next I want to add a little bit of highlight specularity on the eyeball that is supposedly reflecting from the goggles to do that I'm just going to create a spherical Roto and merge it on top and to colorize it I want to switch this output to rgba and click on this Color Picker and change it to green and let's add multiply and reduce the opacity just a bit and then I want to add a bit of feather and then we want to drag this into the eyeball which I already have the transform node that is tracking the eyeball right here and lastly I will also want to add some extra green light that is emitting from the goggles which is basically the same thing as before just a green Roto that I have added some blur and also a little bit of glow and once again if you're looking for VFX stock footage like we used in this tutorial you can check out our website at actionvfx.com we provide a vast library of high quality VFX assets that you can purchase right now for your projects learn more about this and our subscriptions below thank you for watching this tutorial on converting day to night if you enjoyed this video feel free to hit like subscribe and let us us know in the comment section below what kind of tutorials that you'd like to see next see you next time bye 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Channel: ActionVFX

Views: 18,492

Keywords: day to night nuke tutorial, day to night, day for night, color correction, day to night conversion in nuke, day to night conversion, day for night color grading, nuke tutorial, actionvfx

Id: DpORZZeXF14

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022